Hosting Static Sites With Blackblaze

One of my most hated things is dealing with hosting and all the shit that is wrapped up in that world. I wish I could host everything on GitHub Pages. Their system and workflow are perfect for my brain.

There has been countless articles on hosting static sites on Amazon s3. But there was something that kept me away from that. I don’t know why, I never had a bad experience. But I never set up any of my static sites there.

Blackblaze has long been in the backup game. They would allow you to back up your data with a desktop app and they claim that they will allow unlimited backups. Again this was another service that I never used.

Blackblaze announced a new cloud service that would trivialize Amazon’s s3. Blackblaze’s biggest selling point is they have a much lower cost per gigabyte than Amazon. They also provide ten gigs free and a certain amount of bandwidth each day.

Blackblaze has some application support for accessing your files. Cyberduck and Dropshare are just a few of the applications you can use for managing your files.

It seemed like a perfect spot to try and host some of my static sites and get a perfect workflow to go along with it.

Blackblaze ask you to create a bucket for your files. They are basically like folders. Then inside those buckets you can add in your files.

As you can see above, if you upload an html file you can get a direct link to that file. The same would work for any other types of static assets. Blackblaze generates a long URL and if you wanted to use it to fully host a static site you could just update your cname record to go to your long url to get it live.

I used B2 storage multiple times recently to show off work in progress sites. I also started moving some of my single pages sites over to being hosted here. It was fast and easy to navigate and easy to make sure things were backed up.